Google Is Making It Easier To Find Search Results From Reddit and Other Forums

Google is making it easier to find search results from Reddit and other forum sites. Engadget reports: The search engine is adding a new module that will surface discussions happening on forums across the web for queries that may benefit from crowd-sourced answers. The "discussions and forums" module will surface relevant posts from sites like Reddit and Quora alongside more traditional search results. It's not clear exactly how Google is determining what types of searches are best suited to forum posts. The company says the new "forum" results will "appear when you search for something that might benefit from the diverse personal experiences found in online discussions."

Google is also adding a new feature to news-related searches that will make it easier to browse international headlines that are published in languages other than English. With the change, news-related searches will also turn up relevant local coverage translated by Google. In other Google Search-related news, the company announced that starting today people in the U.S. will be able to use their new "Results About You" feature, "which aims to provide a simpler way for people to get their sensitive personal information out of the company's search results," reports Gizmodo. "Next year, Results About You will become proactive and allow users to opt in to alerts when new personal information related to them appears in search results, enabling users to request removal more quickly."

site:reddit.com keyword

[thesjaakspoiler]

We have had this feature for the last 20 years I think.
It's the prefered way to use GoogleSearch anyway.

Re:site:reddit.com keyword

[AmiMoJo]

But this way you can get the stupidity of the crowd just by asking a normal question!

A few years back Google's stated goal was to be like the computer on Star Trek. You ask it a natural language question, it gives you a correct natural language answer. Unfortunately the wisdom of the internet proved to be somewhat lacking as a source of good advice and factual information.

Also, for the love of his noodliness, why is Quora included in this? I thought Reddit and Stack Overflow were the low bars, until someone invented Quora.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I feel like the quality of trolling is in decline. Feels impersonal and low effort now. What happened to the "drink!" AC who used to stalk me? I miss him.

Re:

[Der Huhn Teufel]

As opposed to the google search optimized sites that contain no information and exist only to serve ads, or just google's own ads?

Re:

[boskone]

yes, I use this feature constantly. but what if, Google had the employees and scale to pull in the top several thousand discussion forums, and then, they indexed that!

I know how to search reddit, what I don't know is what specialty forums I don't know about, particularly when I'm new to a topic, trade or discipline.

Re:

[ayesnymous]

And if I do that site:thing.com a few times, I'll get a "We have detected suspicious activity from your IP address" message along with a CAPTCHA to prove I'm not a robot.

Incomplete index

[ThePangolino]

In the past I have search for verbatim excepts of a post I was looking for and the Google index seemed to not contain it. Is this going to improve?

Re: Incomplete index

[shm]

Came here to ask this. There was a time when you could search for a device name and get reddit posts dealing with Linux driver issues, especially for obscure laptop from Toshiba.

Gave up on reddit some years ago for this reason.

Re:

[mrex]

I'm not sure why this is scored at -1, when it makes an excellent point.

But I suspect why it is scored at -1, when it makes an excellent point.

Re: Incomplete index

[reanjr]

Reddit puts their shit behind a login. It's their decision to not get indexed by Google.

Ironically

[DrXym]

It's still a pain in the ass to find relevant search results on Slashdot, be it by the search bar at the top or by a Google search.

Re:

[dargaud]

When has the search bar ever worked ? Maybe the 1st year of /. existence ?
I don't know why they don't remove it outright. I had an argument with another /.er long ago and I was proven right about 10 years later. I wanted to rub his nose in it (it was an important subject, heh!) but even after extensive searching I could not find that series of posts.

Re:

[del_diablo]

Works if you know what the article is named. Then its just a matter of wading trough the headlines until you find the correct one, since Slashdot at the least has the sanity to sort them chronologically instead of by relevancy aka the one you want is never in the first few pages.
But if you don't know, or can't remember the exact keyword, then yeah... good luck

Re:

[DrXym]

It's not just the article, but user names & comments that I want to search on. e.g. maybe I want to look up an old comment I made for some reason. Searching above with comment text or a username will yield zero results. Searching on Google might yield a handful of results when I know for certain there would be dozens. Both searches are completely broken and useless.

One easy place

[indytx]

Finally, there's an easy way for everyone to search all of my low score Slashdot comments!

Ironic

[RegistrationIsDumb83]

Ironic they announce Reddit and personal search safety in the same post, given how many people are doxxed, impersonated and harassed on Reddit. Admins there do nothing about it, either.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I thought Reddit's website was the kind of thing that Google is supposed to down-rank for being user-hostile. When you go there in a brower it tried to ram the Reddit app up your arse at every opportunity, and makes you log in to see some of the content.

Both of those were supposed to be no-nos in terms of Google search results getting the user to the information they want as quickly and easily as possible.

Re:

[mrex]

Reddit and Google are part of the same big tech cabal due to their compatible leadership politics. This is all about limiting the spread of information and enabling the social engineering of users by big tech.

Remember when Google bought the whole UseNet archive, then permanently removed most of it from Groups?

Try searching Google News, or for that matter Google, for Hunter Biden iCloud hack information.

For that matter, try searching Google News for information on the CHAZ insurrection in Seattle back in 202

Re:

[pete6677]

Establishment, establishment, you always know what's best!

They removed this some time ago

[oldnuskeet]

It used to be a thing, along with, images, maps,news, there was a discussions option that they ended up removing. I even had a plug-in that allowed to use it some time after the removal.

This is going to change things for bloggers

[_xanthus_47]

I've frequented a lot of money making YouTube channels that focus on blogging. One of the biggest strategies that they recommend is using information from forums where users are answering other users' specific questions. They suggest looking up topic ideas online and if the search results returned are not from other blogs and instead point to such forum posts, it means that it can be converted into a blog post that gets traffic. Income School, one of the more popular blogging education channels, proposes this strategy. So, with Google recommending the answers straight from the source, this may throw a wrench in this strategy. Or maybe it won't effect it as it may prefer dedicated blogs to forums. I don't know. But it will be interesting to watch.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Sounds like a lot of effort. The big scam at the moment is books you didn't write.

Look around for some trending topics. Pay a ghost writing 1 cent per word via one of those gig economy ghost writing sites. Pay a voice actor a similar amount to narrate it, because free text-to-speech is banned from Audible. Then self publish on Amazon and Audible as digital copies only, and enjoy your passive income.

Except that unless you get exceedingly lucky it doesn't work, and as a bonus you exploited at least two other

Re:

[del_diablo]

This is not about end users trying to make passive income. Its about those huge bot farms that pop up if you wanted to search for a topic like sleep hygiene, bicycle repairs, exercise, and more.
As a consequence, sourcing proper information has become more valuable, because you often need to go trough a mountain of crap to find the source, as the bot generated pages will SEO higher than the source that might not even be in the first 5-10 pages of google. Often made worse by somebody retelling the same story

Stop "Suggesting" Shit.

[splutty]

How about making it actually easier to search for what you're actually searching for.

Google has gotten to the point where it apparently thinks it knows better than I do what I'm searching for.

Unfortunately the lower level "We're showing you what our algorithm thinks you should search for, not what you actually searched for" can't be turned off, unlike the "Did you mean XXX?"

Re:Stop "Suggesting" Shit.

[Zak3056]

I don't really mind the prompts for "did you mean this other thing?" since most of the time it's catching my typos. But I am absolutely infuriated when it ignores my search terms even when I put them in quotes and use minus signs for shit I specifically don't want only to get results for who knows what... and it's not just google. Everyone's search engines know better than you these days, even site specific search engines are like "nah, man, you don't want to look for that, here's something completely unrelated instead."

Archie and Veronica did better thirty fucking years ago.

Re:

[mrex]

How about making it actually easier to search for what you're actually searching for.

That wouldn't serve the interests of big tech owners.

Bad decision

[reanjr]

Reddit is one of those sites that Google sends me to all the time only to find out I have to open up the link in their app or login to see the content.

It is my understanding that this type of behavior should get them delisted from Google, not promoted.

prefix searches with reddit to get results

[tatroc]

Probably because everyone is now prefixing searches on goolge with 'reddit [the thing i'm searching for]'

Catching up with Brave and DDG

[bill_mcgonigle]

Surprising that this didn't exist before on Google Search when others have had it.

The thing is Google Search is becoming useless. Most information is published on social media these days and Google Search doesn't surface those, at least effectively. From what I can tell YouTube has full text transcriptions of almost all videos now and Google Search can't even use that.

Twenty years ago it was hard to imagine that Google would give up search dominance willingly.

I hate it already

[Ichijo]

More than once I've asked Google a question and it gave me a wrong or irrelevant answer that it presented as fact, with no way to report it.

Sorry, but the "wisdom of the crowds" just isn't. This takes us a step backwards.

Good

[groobly]

These places are the best places to find the workarounds you need for all the p.o.s. software we have to use, primarily made by MS, but also buggilicious stuff like LibreOffice or Acrobat.

What could go wrong?

[GrumpySteen]

It's not like this could possibly promote whackjob conspiracy theories by presenting them to mainstream audiences in their search results, right?

reddit, lol

[Symson]

The quality of answers in reddit is below that of "Yahoo! Answers" when it was shut down. Reddit is also more "mainstream" ie officially approved groupthink narrative; and less entertaining than Y!Answers ever was. For this and many reasons, Google is going down hill at record pace.

I'll be more impressed...

[c-A-d]

When they stop indexing pintrest.

But you still can't find anything that's on GitHub

[bustinbrains]

Search terms that you 100% know exist on GitHub still won't show up in search results on Google and 99% of the results being returned on Google are irrelevant. But running a search on GitHub for the same exact search terms turns up tons of relevant results. I realize it is a somewhat esoteric area of search, but GitHub is the central repository of all things software. You'd think the devs that work at Google would be interested in making sure everything on GitHub was searchable on Google so they themselves could find stuff using their own products. But, nope. Clearly that's not a priority.

Thanks?

[boskone]

I literally need 99% of my searches to return a conversation about the object/tool/technology/concept. How google spent the last 10 years thinking that sham websites clearly written by AI were more important than 1000 comment threads from people actually familiar with the concept is baffling to me.

Another fraction for the wikipedia page

Another fraction for the ACTUAL official site.

Google is almost unusable as is because these things are so buried (if they even exist).

Google wants to pick the answers

[akw0088]

Every time you see google say they want to make things easier, it really is just another opportunity for them to curate the content you see which they can then use to target their desired answers